A Day To Remember

It was an ordinary day, in the way that all our ordinary days are filled with small miracles (SMs) and screw ups (SUs) we hope no one notices.

It started with Rick serving orange juice, toast, and eggs sunnyside up on authentic (Costco) home-baked hash brown patties: piping hot and as if McDonalds had recently changed their deep fat fryer oil.

Not that we’d know about such things. Just guessing.

The bread (SM) was from my baking yesterday.

It was not ordinary.

I’m embarrassed to say because I feel I’m a more humble baker than this, but it was FREAKING perfect. Crust 18 layers deep but only 1/8th of an inch thick. Crumb to make Mrs. Patmore weep. Able to absorb triple its weight in butter.

Give us this day our daily bread, hallowed be your name, etc.

Amen.

The eggs weren’t ordinary, either, unless you live in a world where fresh duck eggs, bought yesterday from the hobby farmer neighbour and almost 75% bigger and twice as nutritious (SM) as chicken eggs are normal fare at your breakfast table.

How have we lived this long (collectively, almost 120 years!) and not once have either of us eaten a duck egg until this morning? Rick was a little worried he wouldn’t care for them, as he doesn’t like goat products.

This will make perfect sense to those of you who like some (but not all) foods to be consistent with the standard bearers of their grocery aisles.

Un-friggin-believable.

Creamy, intensely flavorful in a non-goatlike manner… They were the Rolls-Royces of breakfast eggs, and calorie for calorie, about half the price as their free-roaming happy chicken counterparts.

Like all ordinary days, not everything rolls out with edges as smooth as a well-deserved Kahlua and cream after the last dishes are done on Christmas Eve.

We decided to paint the top of our little table for our north deck so it matched (more or less) our red Adirondack (Costco!) chairs with their gray-black-and red striped cushion. We had some snappy red marine-grade polyurethane paint left over from the canoe repaint this summer, so why not?

Let’s just jump right in to this thing!!

SU alert…

Apparently, sometimes a good sanding and coat of primer are advised between mixing two completely different furniture finishes.

Ironically, it looks sort of cool, in a distressed, couldn’t-have-done-that-in-a-million-years-if-we’d-tried kind of way.

Looking for input here: leave it as is, with maybe a second light coating to smooth the divots, or acknowledge the total fail and start over after inquiring into recommended steps? Leave a comment if you’d care to weigh in.

I didn’t mean to create Farah Fawcett hair (SU), either, although I am pleased that in case the style ever returns to planet Earth, I have finally mastered the look.

We’re considering initiating a Kickstarter fund to finance a consultant to help us figure out, for the good of humanity, how to coerce Rob into going into the processed meat business full-time.

Went for a walk with the dog (SM, how beautiful everything is in a rain forest community in the middle of September), chatted with neighbours, cleaned the bathroom sink…

Then in a transition moment, I drifted to the north porch to gaze into the woods beside our house for a moment, looking for inspiration on how to spend the rest of the day. I leaned my head around the huge post on the corner of our new deck.

It was weeping.

My first thought was “Huh! Sap.”

My second thought was, “Wow. It looks like it’s crying. I wonder if the wood is homesick?”

And my third thought was, “I wonder if buildings and the ground they stand on hold the essences of where their materials have come from, or what they’ve collectively become, or the memories that are created within them?”

And then I remembered today is September 11, and I remembered the buildings, and the numb horror, and the tears, and the sorrow and gratitude and resolve resonating at Ground Zero in New York City today.

The bread looks great, your friends brat’s and partner’s sauerkraut look delicious! How about if you do a KS fund to produce and sell Rick’s sauerkraut?

Your dog is cute. If the 2 of you like Farah Fawcett hair, keep it.

Incredible photo – congratulations!

Do trees and other plants, buildings, etc., hold memories, probably. In some cases most definitely. Is the new post on your deck weeping for the victims of 9/11/2001. Probably not. More likely weeping for the loss of more than 115 species and subspecies of vertebrates in North America, the Hawaiian & Caribbean Islands, since 1492 when Columbus got lost and was saved by Taino/Arawak peoples. Those non-human vertebrates include the Passenger Pigeon, Miller Lake (OR) lamprey, Labrador duck, Heath hen, Carolina & Louisiana parakeets, Texas Henslow’s sparrow, Santa Barbara (CA) song sparrow, Dusky seaside sparrow (FL), Tacoma (WA) pocket gopher, Penasco (NM) chipmunk, Kenai Peninsula (AK) wolf (and a lot of other wolf subspecies), California grizzly bear, Wisconsin (and other) cougars, Eastern elk, Queen Charlotte (QC Islands, BC) caribou, Badlands bighorn, Relict leopard frog, and dozens more species of birds in the Hawaiian Islands and the Caribbean. This doesn’t count the uncounted numbers of invertebrates.

It also doesn’t include the 50-100 million native people who died either from diseases introduced by Europeans, or from direct conflict, poisoning, starvation. More than 200 distinct “tribes” or nations of people living in the Americas have been driven to extinction since 1492.

Yes, the destruction of the World Trade Towers, the attempt on the Pentagon, and the foiled attempt on the White House were terrible incidents. The loss of life those incidents involved pales in comparison to previous losses. It is also a small fraction of the numbers lost every year in the United States to gun violence – more than 10,000 murders, more than 20,000 suicides, a few hundred accidents. Almost 50 children are murdered or injured by guns every day in the USA. EVERY DAY. 17,500 to 18,250 CHILDREN shot – injured or killed each year by/with guns. EVERY YEAR. 262,500 to 273,750 CHILDREN shot – injured or killed – since 9/11/2001. These are truly terrible occurrences. Lets remember those CHILDREN. And lets get/keep guns out of their hands, and out of the hands of criminals. I don’t know how, but let’s try.

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